The legacy of Leaf

Leaf is a weird minor player in the card world now after the brand name was bought just over a decade ago, but back when Leaf was part of DonRuss there were lots of Leaf sets released. Some of them are still very nice, like this one from a quarter century ago.

Card Number 1032: Leaf Legacy, 1997; #356

The aesthetically pleasing shield motif on the front makes up for the photo where Tony's face is obscured. This could almost be an unlicensed card because of the very small amount of franchise logos on show. 

The cardback provides a great snapshot of Tony's career in the middle of the late nineties. The stats among active players are great records of where Tony stood with regard to his peers. These in-career stats are important career markers that don't often get mentioned on cardbacks. 

There's also a photo of Tony jogging in his fielding gear on the back juxtaposed with the write up about his batting average and hit total. 

Total: 1032 cards

Leaf cards from a World Series year

In 1998, Tony led the Padres to the World Series against the Yankees. Here are a couple of Leaf cards from that season.

Card Number 958: Leaf, 1998; #11

This might be a base card, but Leaf went all out on their base cards for their 50th year anniversary, including a foil stamp, bevelled edges on the frame and very clean lettering. 

The design of the cardback is similarly classy, with a single season stats box and biodata arranged the way you would expect to see it on a premium card. 

Card Number 959: Leaf, 1998; #166

Tony's second card in the set had a black and white crowd scene as a background. Based on the caps and hats being worn by everyone, it looks like it might be a baseball crowd in 1949, the first year that Leaf produced baseball cards. 

The write up on the back is about Tony equalling pre-war records or setting records for the modern era. Personally I don't think it's productive to compare Tony's records to Honus Wagner or Rogers Hornsby because, like all sports with a long history, baseball has changed significantly. But if there is one thing that cardback writers liked to do, it was to compare Tony's achievements with long-dead legends of the game. 

Although it wasn't his highest ever batting average, a good case could be made that Tony's absulute career peak was in 1997. Across a full season he hit .372 and, as the cardback attests, he set his own personal records for home runs and RBI. It was the only season he broke three figures on RBI. He also led the league in total hits, with 220 across 149 games. Among those hits, Tony set a personal best for doubles in 1997, which helped him reach his second best slugging percentage in his career. His 'Total Bases' was 324, also a high point of his 20 seasons in the major leagues.

Total: 959 cards

Limited Leafs

A couple of mid-90s shiny cards to brighten up your Thursday!

Card Number 916: Leaf Limited, 1994; #152

You can tell this is a high end card because Tony's name is written in fancy cursive script!

This is so shiny is scans a different colour depending how much light is getting into the room. (I'm using the overhead scanner for this and, seriously, the cards change colour if the sun goes behind a cloud while I'm scanning!) So, sometimes the card looks like this. 

On the back we get a quote from Ozzie Smith, which is superb hyperbole. (Superbole?) 

"Tonys mechanicals are so good they enable him to get hits when he's not hitting. There's no stopping him, you just try to slow him down."

No, I don't know what 'getting hits when he's not hitting' means either. The cameo portrait has a classy surround with that feathered pattern. I'll award a bonus point for including the set name, although it is prominent on the front as well. The one year stats line includes the years he had been active up to this point. That feels like an unusual inclusion in a one-line stats box.

Card Number 917: Leaf Limited Gold, 1995; #20

There were 192 cards in this high end set, and 24 further cards in the 'Gold' insert series, which looked a lot like the regular cards (as can be seen here). They used different photos and the card had a gold back instead of the usual silver. The Gold cards were included at a rate of 1 per pack. 

This time it's the team name in the fancy cursive script.

For some reason they decided to crop off Tony's feet. The converging shiny lines combined with the Leaf Limited logo make it look like he is stading in front of a giant badminton shuttlecock. 

Here's the gold back - with the cursive script used for Tony's name. There's no quote this time, meaning there is space for a breakdown of Tony's monthly stats across his entire career. I was surprised to see July was the month Tony recorded his lowest batting averages. (At least, up to the end of the 1994 season!)

All the cards in Leaf Limited - base and inserts - were limited to a print run of 37,500 cards, apart from the 'Lumberjacks' insert series that were numbered in a print run of 5,000. Tony didn't have a Lumberjack card, but he did have a 'Bat Patrol' insert card (previously blogged here), giving him three cards in quite a small set.

Total: 917 cards 

Tuesday Twins - lookalikey Leafs

In the 1980s Leaf was DonRuss's imprint for the Canadian market. Leaf cards were near-identical 'twins' of DonRuss cards.

Card Number 839: :Leaf, 1986; #41

Tony is watching his team-mates batting to try and suss out the pitcher's arsenal of throws. His look of concentration here would translate into a tendency to swing and make contact with the first pitch he faced when he went up to the plate. 

The back of the card also follows the DonRuss template, but with some French on there for the bilingual Canadian market.

There is mention of a wrist injury in 1985 that hampered Tony's attempt to defend his 1984 batting title. DonRuss / Leaf liked to mention this wider context to explain the figures. Tony had quite the list of injuries catalogued on their cardbacks. 

Card Number 840: Leaf, 1987; #235

The famous "tyre tread" design got reused North of the border.

This card illustrates something called "poor centering". This is very common in cards from the 80s.

The cardback doesn't have all the same information at the DonRuss cards because of the space needed for the French translation. Some of the career highlights carried over from one year's card to the next. It's always interesting to see what they dropped and what they felt was worth repeating.

Total: 840 cards

I am very busy at the moment so will be taking a short break from blogging. I hope to be back in action before the end of the month!

3 from 96 - DonRuss and Leaf

Continuing the theme of cards from the peak of Tony's career and the peak of the overproduction era of the card hobby, here are some cards from the same company issued under different iconic brands.

Card Number 796: DonRuss, 1996; #525

That foil panel between Tony's legs doesn't scan very well. It's a poor choice of placing for such a large graphic element. 

The back has a massive stats box and a photo of Tony. Both photos show Tony in the white pinstripes home uniform. They are from different games though, unless Tony changed his wristguards mid-game for some reason. 

Card Number 797: Leaf MVP Contender, 1996; #8

A very shiny card front.

A very complicated explanation on the cardback.

This was a redemption competition based around who would be named MVP in the 1996 All Star Game. Tony was named in the National League squad for the game, but didn't play. Mike Piazza won the MVP that year, so people would have had to send in a Mike Piazza version of this card to redeem it for one the special gold sets of MVP contenders. I wonder how many people did that.

Card Number 798: Leaf Preferred, 1996; #79

This 150 card set came with a "Steel" insert card in each pack. Steel was Leaf's version of Chrome. This is the regular base card. 

The photo on the front has an odd backdrop and it makes the card look very dull. It's almost as if Tony is in front of a giant sandstone block.

The photo on the back is gorgeous. 

I think that could quite possibly be my favourite photo on a cardback. Look at Tony's grin!

Combined with a simple stats box and a margin of bio-data, I can see why people would prefer this set of Leaf cards.

Total: 798 cards

Wax Pack Wanderers

Two days ago an envelope arrived all the way from North Dakota containing six Tony Gwynn cards that I didn't have before. They were sent by Jeff who blogs at Wax Pack Wonders, along with a note.

Jeff says 'Believe it or not' - well, I believe! And I'm really grateful to be able to give these wanderers a home!

One of the cards was from my favourite ever Leaf set, and in a change to normal practice I'm going to show you the back of the card first.

Card Number 742: Leaf Gold All Stars, 1993; #9

You can tell this is the cardback because it has the copyright notice up the side. On Saturday I blogged about another card from the Leaf 1993 set which had a brilliant cardback featuring a map of upstate New York. The base cards from the 1993 set also had spectacular backs with cityscapes in the background. Tony's brother, Chris, got a card in the Update series of that set too. 

This could have been a "Sharing the Spotlight" post, which is what I do when Tony features on a card with another player. These All Star cards had a National League All Star on one side and an American League All Star on the other. Tony was paired up with none other than Jose Canseco.

The vivid blue background in the photo of Jose really makes that picture look a bit special - more so than the picture of Tony. With the floaty fuzzy clouds and the sunlight striking him, he looks like a demigod. Not a bad cardfront, even if the real interest, for me, is on the cardback!

Thank you Jeff, for this great addition to my collection, and for the other cards too, which I will be blogging soon!

Total: 742 cards

Tuesday Twins - Shiny Leafs

I have started scanning the shiny cards that arrived in the parcel from France, using my overhead scanner. It's slow work because ideally I need daylight to scan the cards in, and I don't have much daylight left after finishing work. However, here are two shiny cards that got scanned last night.

Card Number 738: Leaf Limited, 1996; #53

Even with the overhead scanner the full shininess of the card isn't quite captured. This is lovely in hand. Unfortunately it also suffers from the common affliction of 90s shiny sports cards - there's a slight warp to it now, a quarter of a century later.

I like cards that have Tony's number (19) as their number in the set. But this comes close, with number 53, which is the number Tony wore in Spring Training with the Padres in 1982 and features on his Topps rookie card.

Apart from the set number, the back isn't particularly noteworthy although it does feature a stat I'd not seen before, about Tony's run of seasons posting over .350. That means he was hitting at a rate of more than 1 in 3 at bats, reaching base 7 times for every 20 times he went up to the plate. For all the hitting power in the current Padres line-up, they could really use some consistency like that.

Card Number 739: Leaf Limited Gold, 1996; #53

The gold parallel version of the Leaf Limited is incredibly shiny!

Leaf changed the colour on the cardback to gold as well. This is what I would call a proper parallel, with the card looking different front and back.

These high end cards may be rascals to scan, but they are lovely to look at. I have quite a pile of shiny cards to work through if I can catch some daylight hours over the next week. This may affect my blogging schedule but I promise I will post them all - and they will brighten up some gloomy winter days in the coming months!

Total: 739 cards

Hall of Famer - 14 years early

In 2007 Tony Gwynn was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in the first year he was eligible for the ballot. However, two card companies made an early case for his election, fourteen years previously.

Card Number 734: Leaf Heading for the Hall insert, 1993; #2

I really like the logo for this insert series with the little road heading towards a line drawing of the Hall of Fame. There are some sparkles under his name as well. 

The back is outstanding. Leaf had fantastic cardbacks in their 1993 set and this insert series is no different. The combination of the picture of the National Baseball Museum that houses the Hall of Fame, a map of the area and a mocked up plaque shows some exceptional care from the designers.

Here's what the actual plaque looks like, of course!

On that map you can see Lake Otsuga. Nobody ever really mentions Lake Otsuga when they talk about Cooperstown. This is a photo of it that is also my desktop background so I see it every time I write blog posts!

My wife Cathy and I spent two nights in Cooperstown on our road trip in 2016. I would happily say that the day in Museum and Hall of Fame was one of the best days of my life so far. It probably makes the top 3! 

There was an exhibit in the museum about the player's strike in 1994 that cut the season short. That was the season when Tony was tantalisingly close to breaking .400. (Which is why this blog is called .394!)  That exhibit has one of Tony's shirts from the 1994 season in it.

I also met another very famous celebrity from San Diego!

Anyway,. that's enough about the wonderful experience of going to the National Museum and Hall of Fame. Let's get back to baseball cards. Pinnacle were also considering future contenders for Cooperstown back in 1993...

Card Number 735: Pinnacle Cooperstown Card insert, 1993; #20

One day I am going to count up how many cards I have of Tony in this pose, preparing to sprint to first base, with his discarded bat disappearing off the edge of the card.

There's no map on the back, just another photo in his familiar anticipatory batting stance. 

Pinnacle felt Tony was "well on his way to Cooperstown". He added another four batting titles before he finally got there. 

It feels like both these card companies recognised Tony's greatness well before he retired and was officially inducted into the Hall of Fame. That is a genuine indication of his ability and attitude at the height of his career.

Total: 735 cards 

One card only - cut signature conundrum

Last June Gawain sorted me out a huge stack of Tony Gwynn cards that blasted me past my target of 394 cards within about a month of starting the blog. A year later and he has ticked off another one of my collecting targets by surprising me with my first Tony Gwynn autographed card.

It's an offbeat card and as I started researching about it for this post, I discovered several layers of weirdness attached to it. Gawain wryly commented that meant extra content for the blog and I agreed, saying it truly was a gift that kept on giving.

Card Number 682: Leaf Best of Baseball Cut Signatures, 2011; unnumbered

This is an "authentic cut signature", except the signature hasn't been cut from a piece of card or anything. It's on a small plastic tile, about the thickness of a Scrabble piece, with rounded edges at the top. It's also in a sealed Beckett grading solid plastic box. This was the first conundrum - the card was sealed in and had been authenticated by Beckett, but it's condition was not graded. As Gawain said, why would you bother getting it authenticated and not get it graded?

Well it turns out this is how the card was shipped from the off. On Trading Card Database all the cards in the range are listed as "BGS Encapsulated". Packs of Leaf Best of Baseball consisted of just two cards in these heavy-duty plastic boxes. Each pack contained one each of a range of 'cut signatures' and a graded 'buyback card' of top players du jour rookie cards and vintage cards. The advertising poster for the set claimed there was a 1952 Mickey Mantle card in the set - one of the most sought after cards in the hobby.

Most of the cut signatures were on these plastic tiles. The cardback was devoid of explanations as well.

I went back to the wonderful crowdsourcing resource that is Trading Card Database and asked about these cards on the forums. Two members of the community replied and explained where they came from,

"Leaf purchased the tiles from some company that went out of business. The tiles were originally intended to be attached to the base of a small statue of the player that was in production." - BrewerAndy

"They were supposed to go on the base of a Hartland-type statue but the company went out of business before they could attach them." - trauty

So, that explains the autographed bits of plastic. 

Two more things I learned while researching this odd card. Firstly, I learned that the Leaf company producing trading cards today has no real links to the Leaf company of yore. Up until researching this post, I assumed Leaf had been absorbed by Panini along with DonRuss, Pinnacle and other brands. But apparently the Playoff Company, who were the previous owners of the DonRuss stable of brands before Panini, sold the Leaf name off separately. A company called Razor bought the name in 2010 and switched to trading as Leaf.

The second thing I learned was this was one of the first sets produced as Leaf by the company-formally-known-as-Razor, and it got them into trouble. Because the product included a lot of buybacks, Leaf used images of those cards on their advertising sheet. Many of those cards were Topps cards and as a result Topps sued them for copyright infringement. This was at the beginning of the Topps monopoly and they had already hounded Upper Deck out of the baseball card hobby after Upper Deck produced an unlicensed set the year before Leaf brought this set out. 

All this doesn't detract from the gratitude I feel to Gawain for helping me achieve a collecting goal. If anything, the odd origin of the auto and the corporate shenanigans around the set make the card even more interesting to me. The note from Gawain that came with the card just said "Enjoy!" and I have really enjoyed finding out the back story of this card.

And, ultimately, however odd, it is the first Tony Gwynn autograph in my collection!

Total: 682 cards

Brotherly bonus card

Chris Gwynn, Tony's younger brother, was also a Major League Baseball player. He featured on a card with Tony shortly after making it to the majors, and of course had his own cards too. 

I recently purchased a joblot of random cards because there were several cards from the Leaf 1993 set, which I have toyed with trying to setbuild. It turned out all the Leaf cards were from the Update set (#450 and above). And as an added bonus, one of the Leaf cards was of Chris Gwynn!

I think Chris really looks like his older brother in the photo on the front.

The really nice thing about the Leaf set from 1993 are the cardbacks that include images of relevant landmarks and city-scapes. I presume this is somewhere in Kansas City.

Chris had a fraction of the number of baseball cards that Tony had. Although Chris mainly featured on base cards in common sets, I have only got two of his cards. I have probably got more cards of Tony that mention Chris on the back than cards of Chris!

Bats and stats

A couple of insert cards producd by Leaf today.

Card Number 658: Leaf Limited Bat Patrol insert, 1995; #2

"Bat Patrol" sounds like a terrible Batman spin off from the 80s.

The scan has rendered it white, but the big words saying 'Bat Patrol' are in a pearlescent shiny finish.

I'm guessing this insert series featured the best active batters at the time. There's no explanation on the back - just a very large, quite standard stats box. 

It feels like I am constantly making this point, but even here, just after Tony's record .394 batting average, his career average was still 5 points below his eventual final career average of .338. He still had several years of high averages ahead of him, high enough to drag his overall average up.

Card Number 659: Leaf Statistical Standouts insert, 1994; #9

This card is very shiny and did not scan well on my flatbed.

So I got out the overhead scanner, which captured it in all its shiny glory.

I find it ironic that Leaf called Tony a "statistical standout" in the year when he was destined to become a true statistical standout. It's almost as if they knew.

The cardback mentions Tony's run of 11 seasons posting an average above .300. He woud go on to beat San Musial's streak of 16 seasons. By the end of his career he has scored .300 for 19 seasons in a row.

That is a great photo on the cardback as well. I really like these sort of candid shots taken during practice or while warming up. It's not quite as good as the picture of Tony returning practice balls that he had collected up, but it's still a cool photo. 

The only negative of this card is the slightly odd numbering system. It means it's number 9 out of 10 as there were only 10 cards in the insert series, not card Number 910 or cards 9 and 10.

Total: 659 cards

Milestones and Masterstrokes

In the grand tradition of Sesame Street, today's blog post is brought to you by the letter M.

Card Number 593: Topps Milestones, 1998; #MS6

A beautiful blue holofoil insert card from Topps.

There are a few similarities here with a Pinnacle card I blogged yesterday - same year, same blue holofoil and clouds design, and on the back a reference to how close Tony was to his 3000th hit.

Tony didn't get a ninth batting title and finished his career tied with Honus Wagner on 8 National League titles. 

Card Number 594: Leaf Studio Masterstrokes, 1996; #1

There were 8 cards in this insert series, printed on canvas effect card with the images put through the 'paint effect' feature of Photoshop.

Studio cards were released by the DonRuss company under just the name 'Studio' for a while, before being released as Leaf Studio for a couple of years, and then finally as DonRuss Studio. Tracking the use of the brand name shows how the company was positioning its premium brands. 

On the back there is another reference to Honus Wagner. In 1996, Tony was yet to catch him up.

At the bottom of the cardback is the serial numbering. This is number 701 out of 5,000. While that's only half the number of limited edition serial numbered Diamond Kings cards from the same year, it's still a high number of cards to consider a 'limited edition'.

The paintbrush and blob of blue paint confused me at first glance. I thought Tony was flipping away a bat. It's a nod to the idea of brush strokes on a masterpiece painting. It feels like by the mid-90s card companies were running out of words to use on insert series. Leaf chose Masterstrokes, even though that doesn't really mean anything to do with art or painting. 

Total: 594 cards

The one club man in two hitting clubs

Back to the joblot that arrived from eBay and a rare 'theme post'. Usually I group cards by make or year, but sometimes there are slightly less obvious connections as with these two cards today. As I extracted them from the envelope I realised there was a fun similarity.

Card Number 589: Leaf 300 Club, 1995; #13

The 300 Club was an insert series in honour of the active players in 1995 with a career batting average over .300. 

In 1995 Tony was second on the list with .333, behind Wade Boggs who had .335. However, Tony would go on to finish his career with a batting average of .338, elevating him into the top 20 all time career batting averages. He is the only player in the top 20 born after the Second World War. Wade Boggs meanwhile saw his batting averages tail off in his final seasons in the game, and he finished with a career average of .328 - which is still very, very good, of course.

The rest of the list includes some famous names - Kirby Puckett, Mike Piazza, Paul Molitor, Ken Griffey Jr, and at the bottom, Tony's one-time room-mate at Walla-Walla, John Kruk.

These kind of cards are a great snapshot of who was dominating around that time. There were some very good batsmen competing with Tony for titles in the mid-90s. 

Leaf put Tony in the 300 Club. A few years later Fleer went a digit better.

Card Number 590: Fleer Ultra 3000 Club, 2000; #unnumbered

The joy of collecting cards from the 90s and the turn-of-the-Millennium includes trying to find the things on Trading Card Database. Fleer did their best to hide this one, but I found it in the end. There were '3000 Club' cards inserted in all the Fleer ranges in 2000. There were 2 or 3 cards each in Fleer Focus, Fleer Mystique, Fleer Showcase, Fleer Tradition, and Tony's cards were hidden in packs of Fleer Ultra. 

The card is also a snazzy die-cut!

The middles of the zeroes aren't punched out. Unlike some other card companies (*cough* Topps *cough*), Fleer have got the date of Tony's 3000th hit right.

There's also a nice little write-up that avoids any weird superlatives and is probably one of the best summaries of Tony's playing style - not flashy, just consistently productive. I'd say the same for this card design, with it's big numerals and rounded edges.

This was around the time when Fleer added the year below their logo, which is very handy and earns this card a bonus point. Not that it needs too many bonus points as it's pretty special already.

Total: 590 cards